{"id":540,"date":"2012-04-04T06:45:23","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T06:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=540"},"modified":"2012-04-27T05:58:17","modified_gmt":"2012-04-27T05:58:17","slug":"the-incident-by-kenneth-macleod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"The Incident by Kenneth Macleod"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 5 April 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

368pp, hardback, <\/strong>\u00a312.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Unlike the slap in The Slap<\/em>, the incident in The Incident<\/em> takes place at the end, not the start of the story, at the close of a long day in the life of Craig MacInnes. And the incident\u2019s arrival comes with an element of relief and release (not to mention a light dusting of irony), given the tension the author has steadily built, and sometimes feinted at, during twenty-year-old Craig\u2019s exhausting hours of duty as a volunteer lifeguard and youth activity camp counsellor on a Baltic beach in high summer.<\/p>\n

While on the surface Craig\u2019s story is one of minor tensions \u2013 wasps in the watchtower; irritating colleagues and bosses; aggressive, rule-breaking holiday makers with unpleasant dogs \u2013 there\u2019s a deeper undercurrent of existential angst to this unusual debut which returns repeatedly to three subjects: water; terror; infinity.<\/p>\n

Although Macleod takes a single working day as his formal timespan, he expands his scenario laterally via a number of digressions into related experience, the first being an account of Craig\u2019s grandfather Gordon\u2019s brush with death during World War II. A merchant sailor on a vessel supporting the war effort with a cargo of fuel, Gordon is shipwrecked off the coast of East Africa in 1942 and only survives by clinging to the corpse of a fellow sailor whose life jacket has been fused by fire to his remains.<\/p>\n

Having shared Gordon\u2019s night of terror, adrift at sea, readers will meet him again in a glimpse into Craig\u2019s background late in the book, when the grandfather suddenly tosses his five-year-old grandson into Loch Lomond as a radical and literal means of teaching him to sink or swim and thereby step up as a man.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Craig refers to a passage in the novel he is reading, Melville\u2019s Moby Dick, <\/em>specifically the insanity visited on a sailor, Pip, after being cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean: \u2018He saw God\u2019s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man\u2019s insanity is heaven\u2019s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.\u2019<\/p>\n

And last, longest but least likely of these watery accounts is the story of one of Craig\u2019s colleagues, an East German refugee named Gerd who has survived complicated double-cross and torture by the Stasi, including near drowning in a tomb of a cell, an experience which has granted him too a glimpse of \u2018that celestial thought\u2019.<\/p>\n

While extremis – with or without spirituality – tragedy, philosophy and psychology all have their roles to play in this curious novel, Macleod pulls them together at best weakly as the story reaches its climax. The incident, when it finally occurs, has a perfunctory quality, bringing matters to earth with a punitive thump and a gesture at redemption.<\/p>\n

With its almost exclusively male cast of characters and easy conversational tone, this notably readable first work defies easy categorization. Not a thriller, social drama or bildungsroman<\/em> \u2013 though containing elements of all three \u2013 it nevertheless offers compelling tale-spinning marked by a strong sense of foreboding and hallucination-sharp detail. As a beach read it\u2019s a striking cautionary tale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Elsbeth Lindner<\/p>\n

Unlike the slap in The Slap, the incident in The Incident takes place at the end, not the start of the story, at the close of a long day in the life of Craig MacInnes… […] in Reviews <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":939,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}